Beginning in the 1890s under French colonialism, Tunisia’s Gafsa region supplied European factories with vast quantities of phosphate rock, a key ingredient in chemical fertilizers. Male wageworkers, primarily from Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Italy, extracted the rock from dusty tunnels. They pulverized and washed the ore in plants built near the mining towns’ residential areas, where many of them lived with their families. Drawing on doctors’ reports, biomedical research papers, company documents, and oral histories, this paper explores how French capitalists, doctors, and scientists imagined discretely bounded “industrial” and “natural” spaces in 1920s-1930s Gafsa. I argue that this boundary-making project relied on gendered and raced ways of tracing illness, valuing labor, and distributing the industry’s pollutive consequences. For the French-owned mining company, industrial sites were zones of regulation, where environmental degradation could be managed. But degradation could pass without accountability in spaces imagined as natural. In the decades that followed, Gafsa’s North African residents developed strategies for resistance and survival that both drew on and challenged the industrial-natural binary. They developed multiple, ecologically embedded etiologies of diseases, tracing “manufactured germs” that flowed through currents of wind and water. The result was a protracted, multi-decade, ongoing conflict over where the industrial workplace ended, how far industrial illnesses traveled, and what made polluted grasses dangerous. Ultimately, this paper pushes for an expanded conception of capitalism that accounts for the multiple ways in which it has been ecologically embedded: not only at the systemic level, as scholars in world ecology have shown, but also in the ways that resistance and survival fractured capitalist constructions of nature. To do this, I stand on the shoulders of scholars who have explored gendered and racial capitalism in the Middle East and North Africa and in other world regions. Combining their contributions with work on the social production of nature, this paper traces histories of gender, race, class, and nature together, offering a way to interrogate relationships among these overlapping constructions to craft a broader history of capitalism. This project opens new analytical possibilities that merge approaches from environmental and social history, exploring the social production of nature while centering questions of socio-environmental justice.